This invention relates to telecommunication equipment and services and, more particularly, to automated response units.
Voice response units (VRUs) are automated response apparatus to which a telecommunication customer can connect to obtain a particular service or to speak to a particular person. The customer is greeted by a sequence of electronically generated prompts that, through the interactive responses from the customer, eventually connect the customer to the desired service or person. Typically, the customer's response signal is a DTMF signal that results from pressing one of the touch tone pad buttons. Some of the more sophisticated VRUs in the network today respond to spoken words that either correspond to the touch tone pad buttons that need to be pressed (e.g., "four") or actually correspond to the meaning of the spoken words (e.g., "collect").
The VRU interaction with the customer is limited, however, because in today's VRUs the method for "signaling" by the VRU (i.e., the prompts sent to the customer) is by means of spoken words, and people have a fairly limited capacity when it comes to hearing, comprehending, remembering and thereafter responding to a set of prompts or instructions. The result is that VRUs typically present customers with very few choices in each of their prompts, relying on a hierarchical approach to the prompts and answers that lead customers to the desired state. For example, a store may choose to have the first question resolve the nature of the customer's business with the store. Hence, the first prompt may be "For questions about a bill, press 1; for questions about our sale, press 2; for questions about a recent purchase, press 3; and if you wish to be directed to a particular department, press 4." Once the first question is answered, the store may wish the customer to advance to the next hierarchical level. For example, "For automotive, press 1; for garden supplies, press 2; for clothing, press 3, and for furniture, press 4."
It is readily apparent that while this mode of interaction is very powerful because it allows the store to electronically (and hence inexpensively) handle fairly complex interactions with customers before a person needs to be involved (if at all), it is often frustrating to customers. The frustration arises from situations where the customer needs to "back up" and cannot, when the prompt is too long or too complex for the customer to comprehend and remember, when the customer is guided through too long a sequence of prompts (and hence too time consuming), when even after going through the long sequence of prompts the choice that the customer wishes to make is not offered in any of the prompts (e.g., the customer wishes to talk to someone in cosmetics, and not in automotive, garden supplies, clothing or furniture, as in the above example), etc.
What is needed is a better interface, and I believe that a visual interface holds such a promise.
In a somewhat different context, Bellcore has introduced a communication protocol that provides for bi-directional transmission of data between a stored program control system (SPCS) and specialized customer premises equipment (that includes a display screen), which Bellcore terms "analog display services customer premises equipment." This protocol, which is commonly referred to as ADSI (for Analog Display Services Interface), is described in Bellcore's publication titled "Generic Requirements for an SPCS to Customer Premises Equipment Data Interface for Analog Display Services," TR-NWT-001273, December 1992. The SPCS is connected, directly or remotely, to the CPE. The remote connection may be via the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN). According to the Bellcore-proposed ADSI protocol, the SPCS hosts/servers must meet a number of requirements, and among them are:
The SPCS must be able to generate CPE Alerting Signals (ringing signals); PA1 The SPCS must be able to provide standard dial tone; PA1 The SPCS must be able to receive standard DTMF signaling; PA1 The SPCS must be able to turn off the DTMF receiver; and others.
Those requirements are not compatible with VRUs.
From the above it can be seen that the ADSI protocol aims at providing a limited visual messaging capability to a specialized CPE from a SPCS system that provides the alerting and the dial tone signals to the CPE. PBXs and central offices are such systems. One application for which this capability is apparently aimed is the "voice mail" services that are offered in PBXs or central offices.
A viable extension for VRUs is necessary which provides for interactive operation across the telecommunication network, which eliminates the limitations imposed by the ADSI on the SPCS and CPE equipment, which eliminates the disadvantages of today's VRU-customer interfaces, and which is robust enough to be acceptable to today's telecommunication network.